The Verbruggens were essential to the play, not least because Vanbrugh had customised the sprightly temptress Berinthia to Susanna's talents and reputation for witty, roguish, sexually enterprising characters, most recently Mrs Buxom in Thomas D'Urfey's Don Quixote (a success thanks to "the extraordinary well acting of Mrs Verbruggen", wrote D'Urfey).
Like the action hero, the entrepreneur embodies that enterprising American character that De Tocqueville described.
Emma was the first of Ferber's strong, enterprising women characters.
"The genius of England is universally admitted to be of an eminently enterprising and speculative character," maintained Once a Week magazine, a popular Victorian rag.
But the enterprising title character, a girl with a taste for mysteries, won't let this trickster occasion pass without rescuing its treats.
But their nature is so gentle, their honey sweet, and their moral character benign and enterprising.
Nobody would accuse Powell, on the strength of this book, of being a literary stylist, but the fog-bound world he conjures up, and the wonderful cast of characters he encounters, from grumpy landowners to enterprising journalists, makes for a gripping portrait of another time and place.
But all of that adds to an astonishing depth of character to a city that for all it's enterprising efforts can't quite be tamed, or even understood.
It doesn't push its ambitions too hard, while engaging your sympathy for characters you hope will eventually set aside their self-defeating obsessions and, like enterprising little gerbils or hamsters, break free from their cages.
